Intel Enabling Linux Driver Display Support For Upcoming "Battlemage" GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Enabling Linux Driver Display Support For Upcoming "Battlemage" GPUs

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been busy working to enable the display support for the upcoming Battlemage graphics cards as the successor to DG2/Alchemist...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-Display-Battlemage

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Always good to get more confirmation that Battlemage is still coming.

[Jumbotron]

Always good to get more confirmation that Battlemage is still coming.

Agreed, but I don’t think the question was if Intel was ever going to release Battlemage but in what form. Rumor on the street is that Battlemage will not be released in discreet form. At least not initially. From what I’ve seen of all of Intel’s vaporware slideshows and presentations of future GPU releases I haven’t seen one mock up of a discreet card . Contrast that with their slideware of upcoming and future CPU architectures. They show how the CPU will be laid out with different component and configurations. All these include some kind of iGPU of some kind of arch. Xe currently. Battlemage next. Then Druid which will supersede Battlemage. Each of these are shown as iGPUs only, never with a dGPU counterpart. Then, even more curiously is about the 2026 timeframe Intel is releasing the first clean sheet CPU design since the original Pentium Pro. Along with this will be an all new GPU arch superseding Xe/Battlemage/Druid. The entire die which will have new CPU cores, new iGPU cores, new NPU cores and quite possibly Habana Gaudi AI inference tech since Intel is closing that down and not producing anymore standalone Gaudi chips after Gaudi 3 which has just been released….this die looks REMARKABLY like an Apple Silicon chip, specifically the latest Apple Silicon M3. This new Intel SoC has at least two memory chips on package as well but it’s unknown what capacity. All of this leads me to believe that even if Battlemage is released eventually as a standalone discreet GPU that the days are numbered for Intel discreet GPUs. The world’s computer designs are all going integrated. Between the power of modern day CPUs and multiple cores at that, the power to watt efficiency that modern GPUs have not to mention that Apples M3 is desktop capable and competitive for all but the latest AAA games at 4K, plus the added capabilities of on package NPUs and FPGAs just means that the era of discreet components like GPUs is coming to an end for most people and compute use cases. This becomes even clearer once you tie all those components up with a truly heterogeneous memory protocol like CXL. Apple has had this since the original M1. It truly helps keep every component on an Apple Silicon chip fed with data efficiently and when needed at speed. It’s also crucial because every component on the Apple Silicon package feeds off System RAM. There’s no discreet memory for anything. Apple’s CXL like memory scheme is truly the first one for consumer products. It’s why they can be desktop performant in a laptop with no fans whatsoever. That is what I believe Intel is moving to for their consumer reference platforms by 2026. If Battlemage does indeed come out as a discreet GPU card it may very well be the last from Intel.

[mikk]

Agreed, but I don’t think the question was if Intel was ever going to release Battlemage but in what form. Rumor on the street is that Battlemage will not be released in discreet form.

There is no rumor like this. MLID said they cancelleled the mobile version but who cares for mobile. Desktop version is coming.

[Jumbotron]

There is no rumor like this. MLID said they cancelleled the mobile version but who cares for mobile. Desktop version is coming.

The vast majority of the world’s consumer GPUs are mobile / iGPU. Every Android phone has a mobile GPU. Every Android tablet has a mobile GPU. Every iOS device has a mobile GPU. Every MacOS device has a iGPU. The majority of Consumer x86 Windows desktops has an iGPU. Every Windows laptop has a mobile GPU. And every console, Microsoft X Box, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Switch have an iGPU. Only a minority of consumer desktops have a discreet GPU of any sort. And PC gamers are a smaller minority.

And about Battlemage perhaps being the last Intel discreet GPU ….well….here’s word on the street .

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/95843/intels-next-gen-celestial-and-druid-gpu-rumor-no-discrete-will-be-tile-on-apus/index.html

[Sonadow]

The vast majority of the world’s consumer GPUs are mobile / iGPU. Every Android phone has a mobile GPU. Every Android tablet has a mobile GPU. Every iOS device has a mobile GPU. Every MacOS device has a iGPU. The majority of Consumer x86 Windows desktops has an iGPU. Every Windows laptop has a mobile GPU. And every console, Microsoft X Box, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Switch have an iGPU. Only a minority of consumer desktops have a discreet GPU of any sort. And PC gamers are a smaller minority.

Exact words right out of my mouth.

[Anux]

The vast majority of the world’s consumer GPUs are mobile / iGPU. Every Android phone has a mobile GPU. Every Android tablet has a mobile GPU. Every iOS device has a mobile GPU. Every MacOS device has a iGPU. The majority of Consumer x86 Windows desktops has an iGPU. Every Windows laptop has a mobile GPU. And every console, Microsoft X Box, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Switch have an iGPU. Only a minority of consumer desktops have a discreet GPU of any sort. And PC gamers are a smaller minority.

While true there is no market for intel, because most of those are integrated and already supplied by totally different CPU platforms that won't switch to Intel. Maybe steam deck like handhelds but this is a very small market not worth developing anything for. Xbox/PS would be a market that may have some profit for Intel.

And about Battlemage perhaps being the last Intel discreet GPU ….well….here’s word on the street .

Those rumors are not always what they appear to be. It could very well be that there's no discrete mobile GPU but powerful APUs instead. Would make much more sense with the cancellation of mobile dGPUs in mind. Intel has massive problems getting into the mobile market with it's dGPUs (manufacturers have been burned too often by Intel), if they just release new CPUs with powerful integrated GPUs they already have their established channels.

I'm pretty sure they will stick to their dGPUs for some years, probably no high end for the foreseeable future but I don't care about GPUs above 300 € anyway. I'm actually somewhat exited about their next release, with TSMC 4nm and a refined architecture we hopefully get a massive boost in power efficiency. I was super pessimistic after the first launch but they sort of redeemed themselves and look like the only option for power sensitive Linux users in the future.

[Terr-E]

Then Druid which will supersede Battlemage.

Isn't the next one called "Celestial" ?

[mikk]

The vast majority of the world’s consumer GPUs are mobile / iGPU. Every Android phone has a mobile GPU. Every Android tablet has a mobile GPU. Every iOS device has a mobile GPU. Every MacOS device has a iGPU. The majority of Consumer x86 Windows desktops has an iGPU. Every Windows laptop has a mobile GPU. And every console, Microsoft X Box, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Switch have an iGPU. Only a minority of consumer desktops have a discreet GPU of any sort. And PC gamers are a smaller minority.

And about Battlemage perhaps being the last Intel discreet GPU ….well….here’s word on the street .

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/95843/intels-next-gen-celestial-and-druid-gpu-rumor-no-discrete-will-be-tile-on-apus/index.html

We are talking about dGPUS not iGPUs. Lunar Lake gets Battlemage iGPU and Panther Lake gets a Celestial iGPU, Intel won't stop that. Your link is based on MLID which is meaningless. First he said Intel completely shut down Battlemage dGPU, then later he switched to just low end Battlemage and then later he switched to an upper midrange card with 512 EUs which has twice the ALUs over Alchemist. MLID is all you have, this not a credible source.

[Jumbotron]

We are talking about dGPUS not iGPUs. Lunar Lake gets Battlemage iGPU and Panther Lake gets a Celestial iGPU, Intel won't stop that. Your link is based on MLID which is meaningless. First he said Intel completely shut down Battlemage dGPU, then later he switched to just low end Battlemage and then later he switched to an upper midrange card with 512 EUs which has twice the ALUs over Alchemist. MLID is all you have, this not a credible source.

Perhaps. But Intel has been trying to make a decent GPU since 1982 and has failed. They’ve bought companies that specialized in graphics processing and failed ( see i740 from 1998 to see a real Intel clusterfark that actually ended up seeing Intel seed crucial 3D tech to Nvidia which helped launch them to the behemoth they are today ). Then there was the debacle of Larrabee / Phi GPUs made up of 70+ Atom cores with their own type of AVX style SVEs. Intel was so desperate to have a performant mobile GPU to compete with the new mobile AMD Ryzens that they actually began to connect AMD GPUs to their mobile CPUs. Then they just bought out half of AMD’s GPU department along with its leader Raja Koduri and a few other heavy hitters only to produce the very “meh” Arc GPU arch. In fact, in order to play some AAA games in Linux you have to spoof the game into believing it’s NOT using an Intel Arc GPU. Pathetic.

Now most of the heavy hitters from AMD that Intel bought including Raja Koduri are now gone, left to go do other more meaningful things. Intel is in shambles. Pat Gelsinger had to come back to save Intel. He looked around and read the market and realized the world was moving to ARM, the console space with the exception of Nintendo had moved to AMD and the server / HPC space was moving to AMD EPYC and started building foundries to get some income back by making every competitors’ chips along side their own. Battlemage has been delayed until later this year thus delaying every succeeding generation out to beyond 2026. As I said before and firmly stand behind it, the market for discreet computer parts even on the desktop is shrinking just in time for Intel to have dumped yet another metric crap ton of money into another companies talent (the latest being AMD which earlier was ATI) only to produce a meh product. The only hope Intel has of being somewhat competitive as a maker of discreet GPU products is having oneAPI take off in the market place as a viable alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA. Otherwise, the bean counters at Intel and the shareholders will force Pat Gelsinger to cut their losses and give up the dGPU landscape back to AMD and Nvidia and just go back to producing the most power efficient / power per watt iGPUs for low end desktops, business desktops and laptops. It very well could be even if oneAPI penetrates the market now dominated by CUDA and Nvidia that Intel only makes dGPUs for the HPC space as AI accelerators as they tried to do with their many Atom CPU cores Larrabee / Phi cards. For in the end Intel has always been a CPU company first and every other product other than software and compilers has been secondary.

Here’s a nice historical summary for anyone interested in the history of Intel graphics. As someone who recently turned 60 years of age and has been computing since even before the original IBM PC came out, I have witnessed much of this historical timeline posted below. This and watching Intel since the dawn of personal computing does not instill much confidence that we will see discreet Intel GPUs by the end of the 2020’s. With the exception of HPC and AI acceleration.

https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixels/intels-gpu-history